5 Ways to Encourage Secure Collaboration · 1. Set up your workspace so it works for YOUR team Some collaboration and task management solutions are prohibitively rigid. It’s their

5 Ways to Encourage Secure Collaboration

R E D B O O T H . C O M

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Some of the best collaboration happens in

environments with very rigorous security

guidelines. Designed for companies in highly

regulated industries, like finance and healthcare

— or for companies with stringent security

requirements — Redbooth Private Cloud enables

real-time communication and collaboration.

With Redbooth Private Cloud, you install Redbooth

behind your firewall on your own equipment, protected

by your company’s strict security and compliance

measures. The IT managers who install Redbooth Private

Cloud tell us that it’s easy to set up, typically taking two

hours to fully install on their own hardware.

The real question, then, is this: Once you’ve got Redbooth

Private Cloud installed, what steps can you take to

encourage secure collaboration? Here, we’ll look at 5

essential ways that you can do this.


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1. Set up your workspace so it works for YOUR teamSome collaboration and task management solutions are

prohibitively rigid. It’s their way or the highway!

To use them, your whole team has to adapt to a new, unfamiliar,

and sometimes awkward workflow. Redbooth is uniquely flexible

so that you can set up your workspace in a way that supports your

team’s workflow and needs.

Here at the Redbooth offices, we never cease to be surprised by

the range of inventive approaches Redbooth customers take to

customizing their workspaces.

For instance, many companies use Redbooth to help make

meetings more efficient. Some set up their task lists so they’re

ready to refer back to in meetings:

The days of writing up a detailed agenda, taking notes, and

sending emails with action items after a meeting are over!

With Redbooth, your agenda is ready to go — and it takes just

a few seconds to add tasks during the meeting itself. This frees

up time and energy to focus on actually following through on

essential tasks.

Task lists can be used in other ways as well. One Redbooth

customer in the technology industry keeps a task list called

“inbox.” It serves as a catchall for things they don’t want to forget.


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This way, no task gets lost, especially the little tasks that have a

tendency to fall through the cracks when things get busy.

With this “inbox” task

list, it’s easy for team

members who have

some extra time to claim

a task that needs to be

resolved.

How you use Redbooth

task lists and tasks is completely up to you and your organization.

You also have complete freedom with how you name and set up

your projects. We hear from customers who have set up projects

in all kinds of different ways:

• Client Names

Name each project after one of your clients, so you have a

single “bucket” to hold all of the information and conversations

for each client.

• Department Names

Name each project after a different department: Marketing,

Operations, and so on.

• Deliverables

Name each project after a major deliverable: Annual Report,

New Website, etc.

You can name your projects and task lists any way you want,

including a mix of all of the naming conventions described here.

The key is to make sure that you do it in a way that supports your

team’s needs and preferences.

Redbooth Private Cloud customers also receive a dedicated

Customer Success Manager, who will work with you to understand

your organization and make setup recommendations to ensure

that the transition to Redbooth is as seamless as possible.


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2. Give your team an easy way to communicate securelyEven with the best intentions, good ideas get lost all the time. To

make sure that everyone gets looped in on a conversation, it’s

common to send an email and cc a whole crowd of people. The

downside, of course, is that emails pile up in people’s inboxes,

often going unread.

This creates a vicious cycle as people begin to realize that their

ideas may not even be read at all. They stop contributing and

start keeping their innovative ideas and helpful questions to

themselves. The amount of value that goes uncaptured can be

devastating to a business.

Redbooth takes a completely different

approach. For questions that require an

immediate response, built-in chat makes

it easy to get answers. See if a colleague

is online and send a chat message —

you’ll likely get a reply back right away.

(When words aren’t enough, it’s easy to

access a complete emoji library, too!)

For discussions related to specific tasks, you can share comments

and attach files in the task itself. All of the comments are captured in

context so that it’s easy to go back and retrace steps if needed. You

can easily “mention” (or tag) other people, alerting them that you

have a question or response for them to pay special attention to.


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These task-related discussions open the door to meaningful

collaboration. Everyone has a chance to be heard, to ask

questions, and to respond. Privacy settings enable you to include

all users, a specific team, or even just a handful of people.

Finally, conversation threads are not tied

to specific tasks, but fall under projects

instead.

Here at Redbooth, we have a lot of fun

on conversation threads welcoming new

employees to our rapidly growing team,

easily embedding videos and GIFs to add

a fun personal touch.

3. Know who is doing what so important tasks don’t fall through the cracksThere’s one crucial component of collaboration that is often

overlooked. But take it away, and your collaboration effectiveness

plummets. That component: Accountability.

Once you have secure spaces for brainstorming and questioning

together, it’s necessary to ensure that projects will be seen

through to execution. And the best way to do that is to have a

transparent approach for clearly seeing who is responsible for

what.

In Redbooth, you can assign tasks to specific team members. For

each task, you have the

option of also adding a due

date.

You can also keep the date

open-ended or simply mark


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a task as “urgent.”

Many tasks require the

active participation of

multiple team members. For

example, after you complete

your phase of a task, you can easily reassign it to the person

responsible for the next phase of the process.

This way, it’s crystal clear who is responsible for which tasks at

any given moment, which helps keep projects moving forward on

track.

4. Capture everything so new team members can get up to speed fast — and start contributingWhen you hire someone great, you want them to be able to start

contributing as soon as possible. When new employees join a

company, they are often directed to a shared drive to explore a

repository of documents or a company wiki to get up to speed.

While it’s helpful to have access to those files, without context

they can be difficult to process. For example, who worked on this

report? What were the circumstances surrounding the creation of

that file?

In Redbooth, a new employee has an extraordinary opportunity to

delve into not only key files, but all of the context and discussion

around those files. A powerful search function can help them to

locate specific topics quickly.

Just as important, new employees can much more quickly get a

sense of company culture and jargon. Understanding these things

gives new employees the ability to “speak the lingo” faster and

acclimate much more efficiently.


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One Redbooth customer, a global consulting company, found that

after implementing Redbooth, new employees on their IT team

were getting up to speed in half the amount of time — instead

of the allotted 6 months, they only required 3 months to hit the

ground running.

Your discussions, task lists, conversations, and projects are a

veritable treasure trove that can empower new employees to add

value faster and more strategically.

5. Integrate with the technology your team already usesWhen it comes to new software, there are two approaches: Ask

your team to abandon everything they currently use, or leverage

their comfort with existing software to jumpstart adoption of the

new solution.

At Redbooth, we believe that integrating with software your

team already uses is a wonderful approach. That’s why we offer

integrations with popular software and systems that we’ve found

to be commonly used by Redbooth Private Cloud customers.

For example, whether you’re running Outlook 2013, 2010, or even

2007, you can integrate your Outlook account with Redbooth.

Convert any email to a Redbooth task, or create a new task in

Redbooth without even having to leave Outlook.

If your company uses Box for secure file storage, you can easily

integrate your Box account with Redbooth as well. Effortlessly


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ensure that any file you attach to a task or project is automatically

updated to the most current version.

Do you use MS Project? Our team can get you set up to sync

back and forth between Redbooth and MS Project. Back up

all of your Redbooth projects as MS Project files, and visualize

Redbooth tasks as a Gantt chart inside MS Project.

Providing your team with a collaboration solution that works hand-

in-hand with technology they’re already accustomed to will help

accelerate onboarding — and boost productivity as well.


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Encourage Secure Collaboration at Your Company

With Redbooth Private Cloud, you can encourage secure collaboration

behind your firewall, protected by the rigorous measures you have in place to

safeguard your data and IP.

Redbooth Private Cloud makes it easy for you to:

Easy Installation and Setup

Most IT managers have Redbooth Private Cloud installed and set up in

just a few hours. If you have Active Directory, onboarding takes only a

few minutes (see how it works at redbooth.com/blog/private-cloud-

onboarding).

Find Out More About Private Cloud

To find out more about Redbooth Private Cloud, visit redbooth.com/

private-cloud where you can hear what customers are saying, download

a data sheet, and explore detailed Private Cloud documentation.

Get a Free Trial

To talk with a member of the Redbooth sales team and get set up with

a free Private Cloud trial, visit go.redbooth.com/contact-private-cloud

— we’re here to help you be successful!

1 Set up your workspace so it works for YOUR team

2 Give your team an easy way to communicate securely

5 Integrate with the technology your team already uses

3 Know who is doing what so important tasks don’t fall through the cracks

4 Capture everything so new team members can get up to speed fast —

and start contributing

Documents

5 Ways to Encourage Secure Collaboration · 1. Set up your workspace so it works for YOUR team Some collaboration and task management solutions are prohibitively rigid. It’s their